


I pick and chose who deserves my trust, and lately, it isn't you

by Multifandom_damnation



Category: Titans (TV 2018)
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Animal Instincts, Demonic Possession, Families of Choice, Gen, Homesickness, Loss of Trust, Near Death Experiences, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Team Bonding, Team Dynamics, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-12
Updated: 2020-01-12
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:54:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22219633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Multifandom_damnation/pseuds/Multifandom_damnation
Summary: The battle is over, Trigon is defeated, the world is saved, and Garfield just got the shit kicked out of him so badly that he almost died. Nobody acknowledges that he was the one to pull Rachel out of her possession or that he was nearly killed by the people he called family, except for Hank and Dawn, who help him pull the glass out of his back and wipe the blood from his face while the others are celebrating their victory.But even though Hank and Dawn say they're sorry for what happened, that it was Trigon's control, that it would never happen again, that he had nothing to worry about, that he was loved and valued and respected, the tiger doesn't trust them, and frankly, neither does Garfield. Not anymore. Maybe not ever again.
Relationships: Garfield Logan & Everyone
Comments: 28
Kudos: 110





	I pick and chose who deserves my trust, and lately, it isn't you

**Author's Note:**

> TITANS ARE BACK BITCHES!!  
> God, I love this show so much???? I started writing this when I watched episode 1 two days ago and now I'm only up to episode 6 and I just WANT TO WRITE SO MUCH BUT I HAVE TO WAIT BECAUSE I DON'T KNOW WHAT HAPPENS YET??? DO YOU UNDERSTAND MY STRUGGLE??? So get ready for this being the only thing I talk about for like, a few months. PS. I love Hank and Dawn. This was fun to write and I really hope that you guys enjoy it, because I certainly did xx

While everyone else was celebrating over in the corner, hugging and laughing and rejoicing that the world hadn't ended yet, Garfield was sitting on a picnic table away from everyone while Dawn gently wiped the blood off of his face with a wet cloth and Hank picked the shards of glass and wooden splinters out of his scalp and his back.

It was natural that Hank and Dawn had been the ones who volunteered to help. Everyone else was too busy celebrating their survival, and besides, they didn’t really know anyone other than Dick and Donna, so helping Garfield was the only way that they could be helpful and productive without having to socialise with the alien made of fire or the girl who's demon dad just possessed them to try and end the world or the angry new Robin who thinks he’s some kind of hero because he’s trained by the big bad bat.

But while they were being as gentle as they possibly could be, Garfield couldn’t help but flinch under their touch. His face stung, his bones ached, even his bruises had bruises, and all he could think about was the empty look in their black eyes as they tried to beat him to death. No matter how gentle they were, he knew firsthand what those hands could do, now.

“Stop moving so much,” Dawn chided, but her eyes were worried and her voice was calm and light, so Garfield didn’t feel like he had done something wrong. “I don’t want to make it any worse. I can clean the blood, but there’s a lot of swelling.”

Garfield didn’t know what to say, so he didn’t say anything, and just tried not to wince or jump as Hank pulled a rather long shard of glass from between his shoulder blades. “Sorry,” Hank said, and to his credit, he did actually sound apologetic. “Dawn, pass me a towel. He’s bleeding again.”

There were a lot of things that Garfield wanted to say, but instead, he watched Dawn scramble for a towel at her side and hand it to Hank over Garfield’s shoulder. Hank’s massive hand came into Garfield’s peripheral for just a moment before it clutched at the towel and was gone. 

It spoke volumes that Garfield could feel the sticky blood pouring down his skin. They had taken off his jacket and thrown away his shirt to get a better look at his skin, at the mottled layers of bruises and cuts and swollen lumps. It was fine though- he’d been covered in blood before, sticky and wet and warm, but this was the first time that the blood had been his own. 

But at least his jacket didn’t get dirty. That was the last bout of bad luck that he needed.

He wouldn’t say it out loud, but it was hard for him to sit still, not because of the hands touching all the most painful parts of his skin, but because it was hard for him to imagine soft-spoken Dawn and gentle-giant Hank beating him on the ground until his skin blossomed in bruises and the floor was covered in blood. But it happened, no matter how hard it was for him to imagine it. If they could turn on him like that by just being shown something horrible, then how easy would it be for them to turn on him again?

Every soft stroke of Dawn’s hands down his cheeks felt like a slap to the face. Every pull of a splinter or a piece of glass felt like a dagger down his spine. Sometimes, when he blinked, he saw the inky black ring around Dawn’s once-caring eyes and the darkness like spiderwebs crawling towards the cruel curve of her lips. But then he would blink, and it would be gone, and Dawn would just be smiling at him with that glow she always seemed to have.

Even Hank’s hands, which had been so gentle this whole time, Garfield feared would turn rough and the soft contact would become hard blows, and he tried not to flinch every time Hank pulled a shard out a little too hard.

They tried to joke, to make him laugh, to bring some levity to the situation, which he appreciated, but laughing and joking were currently the furthest things from his mind. He watched Kory hold Dick’s hand just a little too tightly and for Rachel to hug Jason for a little too long and for Donna to smile a little too brightly, and all Garfield could think about was how moments ago they were all trying to kill him and wondered if this was fake or not. He couldn’t be sure.

Even the tiger didn't like the way they smelled anymore. Garfield used to trust the tiger's instincts because they were almost always right, but how could he trust the tiger when it was telling him that his friends were not to be trusted and to run away as far and as fast as he could? It took all of Garfield's self-control to hold back the tiger, to stop it from growling and snarling at them whenever they got too close.

How could Garfield trust the people he was beginning to think of as family if the tiger didn't even like the way they smelled?

“Hey, Tiger Boy,” Hank said. “You look a little green. You’re not going to transform and make me pick glass out of your fur, are you? I don’t want you to bite me.”

Garfield blinked- he’d hardly heard what Hank had said. “No, I won’t bite. Blood grosses me out.”

There was no comment from Hank, but Dawn paused scrubbing off the blood from his face to look him in the eyes. “You are looking a little sickly. Are you alright? Because if you’re going to throw up, I’d like some warning so I’m not sitting in the way.”

“No, I’m fine,” Garfield lied. Well, not about throwing up, but he wasn’t necessarily _fine_. “Just a little tired, that’s all.”

Frowning, Dawn licked at her thumb and wiped some of the blood that she had missed off of his chin, and paused immediately. “Oh- sorry. Old habit.”

“Don’t worry,” Garfield reassured. “Rita does it all the time. I’m pretty used to it.”

“Who the fuck is Rita?” Hank asked from behind him and yanked another piece of glass from his lower back.

“She’s like…” Garfield began but paused. How could you describe someone who means so much to you with enough love to strangers who had never met her? Who had never been basked in her light? “You know how at family gatherings you always have this really propper aunt who tells all the girls to sit with their legs closed and boys to not talk with their mouthful or to put your elbows on the table or not to run in the hall, and she’s always got all these stories about when she was growing up that should be boring but aren’t? She’s like that. Not quite a mother-figure or a sister or anything, she’s too old for that, but sort of like… I don’t know how to describe it. She’s like an aunt. That’s all.”

Hank hummed appreciatively. “I get that. So you live in a house with just you and this… wine-aunt?”

The term fit Rita so well that Garfield found himself laughing at it. “No, there’s Cliff, too. He used to be a racecar driver, a pretty famous one too, but he got into an accident and now he’s just a brain in a giant robot body. It’s a lot cooler than it sounds. But he’s great- he’s a grumpy prick sometimes, but he’s just trying to look after us. Then there’s Larry- he used to be a pilot, but he flew too high and now like, a space monster made of cosmic electricity lives in his skin, so he has to wear special bandages or he’ll give everyone radiation poisoning.”

Dawn was looking at him in shock, and he couldn’t see Hank’s reaction, but he assumed it was much the same. “Is… Rita the only one without… powers?”

“I wouldn’t call them powers. More like problems.” Garfield said. “But no- she’s like elastic and can stretch and melt and things. She felt into a contaminated river and it messed up her cells or something like that, I’m not too good at science, but she used to be an actress. She’s really pretty when she’s not a giant glob.”

“Oh,” was all Dawn said. Her eyes were wide. Hank was laughing. 

“Jane’s a little harder to explain,” Garfield continued. “I think someone hurt her when she was little. But now she’s got- as far as I know- sixty-something different personalities and they all have different superpowers. It’s so cool. The other’s haven’t met her yet, because she’s not around the house much, but I wish they could meet her. She’s great. And at least one of her personalities would like them. Then there’s Vic- he’s a cyborg, and like, my best friend. They haven’t met him either.”

Hank had finally finished picking shards of things out of his back and now ran a wet cloth down his skin to clean away the blood sticking to it. “Is that all?” He asked, and Garfield was smitten with the awe in his voice. “I remember Dick mentioning something about some dude in a wheelchair. Rachel broke his back I think.”

It was as if all of Garfield’s energy and enthusiasm was sucked out of him through his toes, and he slumped into himself and hung his head so quickly that Dawn and Hank were exchanging looks over his head. “I uh… I don’t really want to talk about the Chief at the moment, actually.”

“That’s alright,” Dawn said in that gentle voice of hers. “Thank you for telling us about them. It was very sweet. Do you…”

She didn’t need to finish, because Garfield did it for her. “Miss them? Yeah. Every fucking day. And let me tell you, one of Rita’s hugs or a bowl of Larry’s mashed-potatoes would go down really well right now.”

He winced as Hank brushed over a rather sensitive spot on his back. Garfield didn’t say anything, but Hank was watching like… well, like a hawk, and he noticed the movement. “Hey, kid… you know that we’re all really sorry about what happened in there, right? None of us wanted to do that.”

“I know,” Garfield said and hoped he sounded genuine. “Besides, Dick couldn’t even pick me up on a good day, let alone throw me into a glass cabinet like that.”

Dawn laughed, but her smile didn’t quite reach her eyes. “We thought you’d died,” she said, not meeting his eyes. “That we killed you.”

“So did I,” Garfield said. “But guess what? I turned into a snake for the first time, if you can believe it.”

“Holy shit,” Hank said and his excitement sounded real. “A snake? I thought you could only do like, tigers and stuff?”

“Me too,” Garfield laughed, and it felt so nice to laugh after the hectic week he’d had. “Imagine my surprise when I started slithering across the floor. I just thought about something with fewer bones so it didn’t hurt as much and… snake.”

Hank sighed. “God, that sounds so cool. What else can you do?”

“At this point?" Garfield said. "A tiger and a snake, but I can’t promise you that I’ll be a snake ever again.”

“Alright, enough you two,” Dawn smiled, and for a short moment, Garfield felt himself relax.

But then he looked up, past Dawn and her halo of hair glowing in the sunlight, at the rest of the Titans, new and old, walking towards their little picnic table from where they had made themselves comfortable at the side of the house, and they were walking slowly, but Garfield could feel his chest tightening and his body stiffening at the sight of all of them walking over. The tiger was growling low in his chest and scratching at his insides and even the snake was hissing in warning, which was a new sensation altogether. If having Hank and Dawn so close to him was too much, he wasn’t sure how he’d deal with the rest of the team, even Rachel.

Dawn must have noticed because she rested a hand on his jiggling knee. “Are you alright? You look like you’re going to pass out.”

“Yeah, uh, yeah,” Garfield managed, his tongue suddenly feeling too heavy and his mouth too dry. “I’m not um, not too sure how I feel about all of them coming over here.”

Frowning, Dawn craned her neck to see behind her as Hank reached the conclusion from his vantage point behind Garfield. “Look, kid, you know that… they’re not going to hurt you. Right? That was all Trigon. None of them- none of _us_ \- actually want you dead. That’s never going to happen again.”

Garfield licked at his lips. It was getting harder to look at Dawn’s caring face without seeing the inky black darkness in her eyes. “I mean, yeah, sure, of course. I know that. Yeah. No worries.”

He had wanted to sound convincing, but he had apparently missed the mark. Dawn was watching him with an intense gaze, and Garfield couldn’t meet her eyes. “Gar, if you’re uncomfortable, we can ask them to leave. None of us has to be here if you don’t want us to be. It’s that easy.”

But Garfield didn’t answer. He just stretched a stained smile across his face, familiar as his own reflection, as the others approached. “Hey,” Dick greeted with that small smile of his that always seemed to make everything OK- but not this time. “Everyone ready to go? How are you doing, Gar?”

“Much better now,” Garfield said. “Hank and Dawn took good care of me, but really, there’s nothing that a nice, long nap couldn’t fix.”

Rachel flounced over- still his Rachel but _not_ , now twisted and broken into something unrecognizable except for face and name, and the tiger no longer liked the scent of her- and wrapped her arms around him. He tried not to stiffen, and slowly wrapped his arms around her too. Hank rested a comforting hand on his shoulder. “I’m so glad you’re alright,” she said into his skin. “I don’t know what I would have done if anything had happened to you.”

He wanted to point out that something _did_ happen to him, he had been beaten by people he called family and nearly killed, but he didn’t. Instead, he forced himself to hug her tighter, and closed his eyes, and quieted his tiger. “Me too, Rach. It’s good to have you back. That eye-makeup didn’t suit you.”

Her laugh was sweet as she pulled away but didn’t let go. Hank and Dawn were both looking at him with barely concealed worry, but he didn’t acknowledge them, and they didn’t say anything. Dick broke the silence. “Let’s get this show on the road then, huh?”

“Yeah,” Garfield said, tired and hungry and in need of a hug. Preferably one from Rita. “I’m more than happy to get as far away from this place as I can.”

**Author's Note:**

> If I'm not wrong you guys, the whole thing with the asylum and the train and the spooky house and Trigon all happened in like???? Less than a week??? Maybe like, two or three days??? Which is just fucking crazy. ALL THAT TRAUMA??? AND NOW HE'S NEARLY DIED AND GOTTEN HIS ASS BEAT TOO???? WHY AREN'T WE TALKING ABOUT THIS MORE YOU GUYS???


End file.
